Beauchamp could imagine it to be this or that.  In moments of excited speculation we do not dwell on the possibility that there may be a mixture of motives.

‘I fear I must cross over to France this evening,’ he said to Cecilia.

She replied, ’It is likely to be stormy to-night.  The steamboat may not run.’

’If there’s a doubt of it, I shall find a French lugger.  You are tired, from not sleeping last night.’

‘No,’ she answered, and nodded to Mrs. Devereux, beside whom Mr. Lydiard stood:  ‘You will not drive down alone, you see.’

For a young lady threatened with a tempest in her heart, as disturbing to her as the one gathering in the West for ships at sea, Miss Halkett bore herself well.

CHAPTER XXII

THE DRIVE INTO BEVISHAM

Beauchamp was requested by Cecilia to hold the reins.  His fair companion in the pony-carriage preferred to lean back musing, and he had leisure to think over the blow dealt him by his uncle Everard with so sure an aim so ringingly on the head.  And in the first place he made no attempt to disdain it because it was nothing but artful and heavy-handed, after the mediaeval pattern.  Of old he himself had delighted in artfulness as well as boldness and the unmistakeable hit.  Highly to prize generalship was in his blood, though latterly the very forces propelling him to his political warfare had forbidden the use of it to him.  He saw the patient veteran laying his gun for a long shot—­to give as good as he had received; and in realizing Everard Romfrey’s perfectly placid bearing under provocation, such as he certainly would have maintained while preparing his reply to it, the raw fighting humour of the plot touched the sense of justice in Beauchamp enough to make him own that he had been the first to offend.

He could reflect also on the likelihood that other offended men of his uncle’s age and position would have sulked or stormed, threatening the Parthian shot of the vindictive testator.  If there was godlessness in turning to politics for a weapon to strike a domestic blow, manfulness in some degree signalized it.  Beauchamp could fancy his uncle crying out, Who set the example? and he was not at that instant inclined to dwell on the occult virtues of the example he had set.  To be honest, this elevation of a political puppet like Cecil Baskelett, and the starting him, out of the same family which Turbot, the journalist, had magnified, into Bevisham with such pomp and flourish in opposition to the serious young champion of popular rights and the Puritan style, was ludicrously effective.  Conscienceless of course.  But that was the way of the Old School.

Beauchamp broke the silence by thanking Cecilia once more for saving him from the absurd exhibition of the Radical candidate on the Tory coach-box, and laughing at the grimmish slyness of his uncle Everard’s conspiracy a something in it that was half-smile half-sneer; not exactly malignant, and by no means innocent; something made up of the simplicity of a lighted match, and its proximity to powder, yet neither deadly, in spite of a wicked twinkle, nor at all pretending to be harmless:  in short, a specimen of old English practical humour.